Review by Jordan Cronk: By independent standards and as far as ambient techno goes, Alex Willner’s 2007 debut album as The Field, From Here We Go Sublime, was something of a crossover smash. Here was a record that appealed not only to high-minded techno fetishists, but also to a great deal of casual indie-rock fans who wouldn’t normally go in for something quite so synthetic, trance-like or static in construction. In a sense, Willner simply took the aesthetic that Wolfgang Voigt pioneered with his Gas project in the late 90s – insistent bass pulse, countless layers of ambient guitar texture, and a minimalist’s approach to structure – and repurposed it for a new generation of electronic fans looking for something more subtle and soothing than the then-burgeoning blog-house scene. Yet despite (or maybe because of) it’s debt to its forbearer, it worked like a charm, becoming one of 2007's most acclaimed records and one of the biggest sellers in Voigt’s indelible Kompakt catalogue.Following up a record of Sublime’s magnitude is not something any artist would envy, yet here we are just two years later with a new Field album, and one that is surprisingly bolder and more adventurous than his debut, if not slightly less focused in execution. In other words, it’s a classic transitional album, but as far as these things go, Yesterday and Today is pretty fascinating. And just as Willner’s debut hinted at its ambition through its title, so too does Yesterday and Today chart its direction in helpfully unpretentious fashion. To wit, the six tracks that make up this album are consciously and equally split down the middle between growth experiments and more comfortable refinements of past triumphs. Overall then, Yesterday and Today sounds more like a reconciliation of where Willner’s been and where he’s (hopefully) going than it does an overt change in direction.
Ironically, this ambition turns out to be Yesterday and Today’s defining characteristic as well as its most tiring attribute. As you may have guessed by now, these are some loooong songs, with the album’s six tracks stretching out over an hour in length. People seem to forget that Sublime featured its fair share of lengthy ordeals as well, particularly in its last half, but as is the case with album’s such as these, the highs can easily offset the lows when the artist in question exercises some modicum of concision. This is something Willner hasn’t quite come to grips with yet in my view, and unfortunately it’s accentuated over the course of Yesterday and Today. It's true, minimal techno as a genre has never been characterized by its restraint – in fact, many times its whole demeanor can be defined by how well an artist can force the listener into a trance-like state of submission – but, even still, tracks such as “Leave It” and “Sequenced” reveal their relative charms early on, and more often than not spend the remainder of their 10+ minutes spinning their proverbial wheels, in essence stunting the growth that Willner so playfully applies elsewhere on the album.
Better then these then is opener “I Have the Moon, You Have the Internet” (Song Title of the Year candidate right there folks), which slowly builds with hypnotic synth and carefully placed piano chords to arrive at a sort-of anti-climax, which “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” ably attempts to provide. I can’t say that it completely succeeds, but this cover of the 1980 Korgis original does feature the first appearance of a full vocal line on a Field album, certainly helping it to standout amongst some of the more lengthy tracks here. I’m not sure then if it’s a good or bad sign that the single best track here is the one most closely linked to its predecessor. The swelling, hypnotic penultimate track “The More That I Do” is certainly the late-album highlight here, and it would have feasibly been one of the better tracks on Sublime had it been featured there. This is certainly Willner’s wheelhouse, as clipped, minimal vocal samples repeat in a rapturous haze of ambient textures and propulsive bass pulsations. An entire album of similar retreads would have been damaging to Willner’s development however, but here, “The More That I Do” manages to feel like the perfect end-result of his distinctly narcotized techno.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is the title track, which begins as a rather traditional tech-house piece, only to vamp-out in its final third with live drums courtesy of John Stanier, deity-like percussionist of math-rock megaliths Battles. Unsurprisingly, “Yesterday and Today" comes across as more Lindstrøm than Gas, and as a result it’s easily the most successful of the album’s lengthier, more progressive numbers. More of this build-and-reveal would have helped Yesterday and Today as whole, and while there are no outright bad tracks here, there is also nothing quite as transcendent as the best moments on Sublime. There is more than enough here to wet the appetite of anxious Field fans however, and whether we like to admit it or not, sometimes the most fruitful advances in music are arrived at through patience and dedication, two things that Yesterday and Today rewards in spades. (★★½)
LAST WORD: Yesterday and Today, the sophomore album from Swedish ambient techno artist The Field, experiments with some bold new techniques as often as it plays it close to the vest.
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